Creative Types Learn to Shoot Guns

At Westside Rifle & Pistol Range, a group of newbie marksmen fire at targets featuring photos of them in the name of art.

No. 20 West Twentieth Street looks like an ordinary office building, but go down to the basement and you’ll hear an unusual sound—gunshots, frequent and close. On a recent evening, a group of around a dozen creative types—funky jewelry, high-minded tote bags—arrived at Westside Rifle & Pistol Range and nervously milled about as they waited to shoot at blown-up black-and-white photographs of themselves, in the name of art. The majority of them had never touched a gun before.

“I build for startups,” Silberberg said. They giggled at a novelty target on the wall featuring a cartoon zombie holding a box of pizza.

Their portrait targets were made by the artist Bayeté Ross Smith, who had earlier photographed participants. Ross Smith is a self-described “visual anthropologist;” in the past, he has photographed gun owners and female boxers. At the range, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with a white boom box and the message “Turn the Hate Down,” he informed the creatives, “Today, we hope to raise the questions of who is a victim, who is a target, who is a threat, and how is that related to how we perceive violence.” He added, “I’m always curious who people think should have guns. I’m black and American and I don’t trust only the police and the military to have them. So who gets to have them?”

Ross Smith recalled how, in 2005, firing a handgun at a range in South San Francisco, he’d noticed something odd. “The targets were all, like, caricatures from a cops-and-robbers scenario,” he said. “There were a lot of Arab dudes with rocket-grenade launchers, and even the white guys were supposed to look like gangbangers.” The targets, he said, “didn’t resemble who you’d actually shoot.”

So he dug up studio portraits of himself and his friends, which he’d made for another series, and started firing at those. “The first few times I did it, I felt weird, like it was a bad omen or something,” he said. “But it was fascinating how quickly they start to become simply targets and stop looking human.” [cartoon id="a20476"]

The Westside event was produced by For Freedoms, “the first artist-run super PAC,” which, this past election cycle, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund “art to inspire deeper political engagement.” One of For Freedoms’ co-founders, the artist Eric Gottesman, ushered everyone into a classroom at the range for safety instruction.

“I’m starting to feel a little scared,” Lizania Cruz, a designer and artist, confided. On a wall nearby was a bumper sticker that read “Save Freedom—Stop Hillary.”

The instructor, John Aaron, who had horned monsters tattooed on his neck and arms, began, “Anyone shot a gun before? Video games? Super Soakers? You’re kind of halfway there.”

The students practiced loading magazines into dummy rifles. Reading his audience, Aaron cautioned, “If you want to take a selfie, no sweat, but do realize you have a lethal weapon in your hand.” He went on, “Now, you want to shoot at a target. You have your conventional bull’s-eye, then you have your large human-form target.” The latter, provided by the range, featured a blue man-shape, and, at the bottom, the words “Homeland Security.”

“Can you shoot machine guns here?” Gottesman asked.

Aaron shook his head and said, “This is New York City!” But, he suggested, if you had five thousand dollars and the inclination, you might try Kentucky. “You can rent a helicopter with an electric Gatling gun and strafe cars. That, to me, is the pig’s ass.”

As protective earmuffs and glasses circulated, Brian Boucher, an art writer, asked if people had heard the news about a fourteen-year-old who’d opened fire at a South Carolina elementary school.

“I use this word all the time—‘shooting,’ ” a photographer from Padua named Francesca Magnani said. “It’s so strange. In Italian, they are not the same word.”

In a long cement room with seven shooting stations, a sign warned, “No head shots regulation targets only,” but the arty marksmen had been given permission to open fire on their own images.

The response was giddy. “I nailed this target!” Boucher said, after putting a bullet through his forehead.

The shooters traded targets. Ross Smith had brought extras, featuring images of himself (a recent self-portrait and a photo of him as a smiling boy). Wyatt Gallery, the executive director of For Freedoms, peppered the adult Ross Smith’s face with bullets.

Afterward, Cruz exclaimed, “That wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be!”

“Shooting a gun or shooting a person?” someone asked.

“It’s a lot of fun—that’s an important thing to understand,” Ross Smith said. “People don’t do this for no reason.”

“I did my fifty bullets,” Patiño, the ad woman, said, packing up. “I think if I shoot any more I’ll start to like it.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the January 30, 2017, issue, with the headline “Bull’s-Eye.”

Emma Allen is The New Yorker’s cartoon editor and edits Daily Shouts on newyorker.com.